Context

The managerial system in French public hospitals today faces a pretty challenging environment. Indeed, the very tight regulation, access to health care training difficult, inequalities in treatment between employees of public and private hospitals, create an unfavorable climate.

Unfortunately, Alice Hospital does not escape this observation. Facing the main difficulty of the dissatisfaction of the nurses and the doctors, the frustrations of some members of the staff disadvantage a lot the good work, and the quality of services proposed to patients.

Adelaide’s Hospital, a private hospital, collaborated with Alice’s Hospital, in order to share their operating theatre during about one year. Therefore, the private hospital will close its surgery theatre. The delicacy of such a partnership, comes from the fact that the staff of the public hospital will have to collaborate with that of the private hospital; this relationship is very likely to become very confrontational, especially because of unequal treatment in public and private hospitals.

In this situation with huge stakes, we are responsible for recruiting two new members to the staff: an anesthetist and a surgical nurse.

Study phase of the managerial situation

Main problems found

At a management level

Public hospital relies too much on foreigner (and interim) doctors (whom salary is much more than French doctors)

Apart from those doctors, the others are poorly paid, and overworked

The communication with the employees of the hospital is not put in place

Private hospitals have more freedom in their management than public hospitals (this is why nurses have more tasks in private hospitals than in public ones, are more paid…)

At a regulation level

The laws that forces and limits the use of nurses’ task (creates the frustration of nurses)

At a job level

The access to the profession is quite selective, so the offer of doctors (anesthetist specially) is low.

Potential threats: problem consequences

All the problems found in this case are more likely to have consequences on the hospital:

The turnover of nurses in public hospitals can rise soon

The French doctors could want to go abroad to work to earn more (the offer would decrease)

Consequence for the company:

According to James Mc Kinsey, “the" reference in business strategy consulting, 70% of reorganization projects fail because of a lack of consideration of the human factor.

Still according to him: "Managers must consider the human element in human resources management. If the human aspect is not taken into account, this will have consequences for employees".

Consequence for employees:

This change is imposed, management must communicate very widely with its employees to know their needs and expectations.

To prevent these consequences from being achieved, we have considered our objectives and what solutions could be put in place to achieve them.

Searching phase of the case

Objectives

Facing all those difficulties in Alice’ Hospital, we have to implement a really good work atmosphere before recruiting the new staff members, an atmosphere that will last in order to increase the satisfaction of both nurses and doctors. Knowing that a good atmosphere leads to a better cohesion between teammates, in order to provide the best medical care possible to our patients our goals for this mission are to:

Reduce the employee turnover

Recruit and integrate eﬃciently permanent doctor and nurses

Increase the satisfaction level of employees

Ensure policies, procedures and performance measures

Involve and commit employees in the change process

To achieve our goals, we define a clear long term of the hospital that we will share and that we will communicate on during internal meetings with the employees in order to make them be aware that

“A good atmosphere leads to a better cohesion between teams and to provide the best medical care possible to our patients” and that now they have to behave in line with our values and vision; phase of awareness of the need for change by clarifying the hospital's vision

Solutions proposed

The solutions that we are able to suggest are directly related to the recruitment itself, but also for the satisfaction in general: